Underfunded school boards can often get people to do volunteer work for them (hey, it's beneficial to their kids (or it's the kids that are doing the volunteering)).
This presumes, of course, that you don't have people like this Darga guy, greeting potential volunteers with a firehose and nightstick.
When I was first reading that letter, I was expecting it to be a (badly written) lead-in to a request for volunteer support. This could have been a good thing.
The "you are a prick" part caught me off guard. If Mr. Darga needs some help, he is NEVER going to get it with that kind of attitude (even from his co-workers and underlings).
I think that Mr. Darge needs a vacation, a good course in stress management and another course in dealing with the public.
This actually raises the point of the interaction between spam and service via email.
I can actually understand it in this case, where there wasn't an obvious alternative to email service -- and it actually makes sense in the context of the BC rules of court (which I've read) which allows a judge to OK non-standard methods of service, in a specific case where traditional methods have been proven non-fruitful.
This decision does not appear to approve email service as a general method. It does, however, mean that if you're playing electronic hide-and-seek with someone who is trying to sue you, you may get 'tagged' by email.
Where I worry about it as a general solution is where someone serves me by email with something that looks like spam (or where spammers catch on to email service, and start to use 'service' envelopes to force people to read their stuff (on pain of default judgement if it was a real notice)).
I would then be stuck between the rock of having to read every piece of spam that comes through my mailbox, and the hard place of missing a notice of lawsuit that the RIAA is suing me for $1,000,000 because I had a DECSS link on my web page.
This reminds me of one of my (original) math jokes... It came from two semi-related incidents: Debunking a 2=1 math proof that our math teacher threw up for us in grade 10, and then learning about how calculus works.
The 2=1 proof depended on creating a non-obvious reference to 0/0=1, and then reducing down to 2=1.
Looking at it for a while, I relized that 0/0=x is the same as solving for 0=x*0... In other words, X can be anything (integer, real , complex...).
In first-year honors calculus, I realized that calculus is based on the same kind of construct, except for that you're solving for the limit of a/b=x as a and b approach zero -- in other words, dancing with the devil of 0/0.
The moral of my story:
Calculus is based on the fact that 0/0 can be anything you want, depending on how you approach it.
Any references to prior art (I first came up with that pun in 1980)?
If what you mean by that is that my ISP has a T1 line and a rackload of matching modems -- yeah, they do. My ISP is an extension of the phone company, and I've gotten a pretty complete description from some of their engineering people..
On the other hand, if you're suggesting that I have a T1 line, or something similar, then:
No. The ADSL is actually an analog signal that goes on higher frequencies than the voice signal that modems do. Depending on the type of ADSL system you have, you may (or may not) need to add a low-pass filter to keep the ADSL signal (essentially low-frequency radio) from frying your ears -- that's essentially what the splitters are (as far as I can tell).
With the older (amati) ADSL modem I had, the splitter failed and, as an experiment (he didn't have a replacement on hand), he tried simply removing it. I couldn't tell the difference. With the (newer/cheaper) 3COM home-connect ADSL modem (which replaced the Amati, when it (sigh) died), pulling out the splitter resulted in serious screech on my phone handset, and shut down the digital signal.
The rest of the phone signal for an ADSL line is regular analog POTS. If you think owherwise, you're confusing ADSL with ISDN. ISDN is a pure digital system
Technically accurate, but you've effectively got your head stuck up MS's butt.:
What they're doing is taxing the competition out of existence... To use the software made by anybody other than Microsoft, you have to pay Microsoft extra money. -- This, of course, presumes that Microsoft will even deign to give you such a license. Although this doesn't technically fully ban such software, it effectively puts them out of the market -- because if you have to buy a microsoft license to use a competitor's product, why not just use the MS product and save the cost of the competition's product?
well, when I use my A-Open 56K modem to connect the via phone to Telus (my isp), I regularly get 40K+ on the connections... (according to my modem, anyways). -- and that's ON TOP of the ADSL signal on the line. (and was in a relatively bad location for ADSL. I rarely got over 2 megabit down, although I almost always got 1/2 megabit up. I was actually near one of those 'holes' where you were too far from the switch center to get ADSL at all).
Now go out there an nail a painting to yer wall!:)
You mean like the 4 foot by 6foot oil painting that I have a bitch of a time finding a good space for when I move?? Or do you mean the other assorted paintings and drawings that I've collected over time, or one of the thousands of photos that I've taken? (you know you're hardcore when the clerk at the commercial photo shop you get your pictures developed at apologizes for not remembering your name when you walk in).
Most of the techies I know tend to have a higher appreciation of art than most of the non-techies I know. (( In truth, many of us will qualify our description of a piece of code as 'beautiful', or 'a piece of art'. This is not meant as a denigration other art forms, but rather an expression of an active asthetic sense)).
A friend of mine once described a run-in that his company had with 'the CIA' a number of years ago.
Before his company got attached to the net, they were using an address of '11.*' for their internal computers, which included a number of Sun workstations -- some doing double duty as routers. For those of you who don't know, RFC 1918 officially designates 3 network ranges for this sort of work -- 192.168.*, 10.* and 172.16.0/12. 11.0 obviously doesn't fit in that range.
When they got their network attached to the 'net, they had to do a good deal of work to renumber all of their computers to have 'proper' IP addresses (either in their assigned block, or in an RFC1918 non-routing block).
Within an hour of connecting their box to the 'net, they got a rather brusque call from an intelligence agency official demanding to know why they were stealing his packets. They had to disconnect from the network and root around their network until they found (and removed) the errant subnet stub. It turns out that they had managed to miss one SUN with a second ethernet card that was no longer attached to an active subnet (but still routing to the stub subnet). This was back at a time when any SUN with two ethernet cards routed by default, and every machine ran routed(8) as a matter of course (much easier than having to do manual routing all the time!). It turns out that the route to the stub network had leaked out to the larger internet and poisoned the routing for a huge pool of machines.
When I teach networking, I use it as an example of why you should always use the proper non-routing addresses for internal networks.
(I just did a whois, and 11.0/8 is actually owned by the Defence Intelligence Agency, not the CIA. Not like there's a big difference for us civies.)
Re:Totally tech ignorant yet "brave" stupod people
on
How to Film a Tornado
·
· Score: 2
Verbal moderate parent: +1 funny.
I think that, perhaps, a better idea than a (flimsy) airplane would be a rocket. Mount it at a likely site, and then, when a nice tornado comes overhead, remote launch it straight into the storm... A couple of solid rocket engines and a casing with a GPS tranmitter in it to help locate it afterwards.
Note that the DMCA's rationale for granting performance royalties in the digital world was based on the concept that digital copies are "perfect" copies and thus the sales of CDs (called "phonorecords" in the act) might be at risk in this new "digital millennium."...
The myth of the "perfect digital copy" is just that -- a myth. This should be the heart of the attack. The argument that current royalty rates would put Internet radio out of business is irrelevent if you accept the claim that Internet radio is threatening to put the recording industry (a much larger industry) out of business.
On the other hand, try this on for size.
Find a reasonably good quality net broadcaster.
Make a copy of a good song off of that net cast.
Make a copy of that same song off of the radio
Play back an original CD of the sound, followed by the netcast, and then the radio copy.
notice which is the best, and which is the worst.
Although a 'perfect' copy of a CD is possible, it takes 300Kbits to do so. A 128Kbit MP3 is good, but I can tell the difference between a CD and an MP3 when played on my rommate's (MP3 CD capable) car stereo.
KASR FM Radio (sports) broadcasts at 20Kbits/second (I'd describe it as grotty)
Euromix Radio(" Pop to house, trance, techno and energy remixes from DJ Daizzy, ToolMix, Terry Tate and..") broadcasts at 32K bits/second. This is actually better quality than many netcasters, but you can definitely tell that it's a net cast.
even with pure voice content in a language I can't understand.
KASR radio (specializing in classical music, and thus a good representative of the "high end" of the quality scale) broadcasts at 64Kbits/second. Decent quality, but -- at 6:30AM, on a Sunday -- they're at their audience limit. I can still hear the bite of audio compression (when I can reach them). --- In fact, they're not up to the quality of AM radio -- much less FM.
Going to their search listing for "Seattle", (where Real Audio is based) shows stations rangingr from 20K bps up to 96K for Groove Radio (split between audio and video). I actually found a listing for a Chicago station that claimed 256K/sec, but I couldn't get to them. (I'm guessing that they're also a video/audio mix).
When I worked at GlobalMedia.com (now defunct), we had people who could squeeze the last bit of quality out of a 64K audio stream... (some webcasters don't quite understand what the issues are for getting a decent quality webcast). Even so, the quality never stood up to broadcast radio -- much less the CD player on my computer going through my (25 year old) receiver.
-----
Once you debunk the 'perfect digital copy' myth, then you can get on to the question of what's a resonable royalty rate, as opposed to what would compensate the RIAA for their supposed loss of business.
According to a friend of mine, it's illegal to sell a computer without an OS license. . . . .
The result is that (in the US) it's viciously difficult to get an Intel box from a large-volume seller that doesn't have Windows pre-loaded on it.
Erg:
It just hit me: The OSF and/or Gnu should sell software licenses. Like: real licenses, with the hologram seals, serial numbers and everything... They chould shrink-wrap thim with a copy of the GPL and they should do all the administrative work of keeping track of them.
That's right -- Licenses to use free operating systems. The end-user would then be free to {,buy and} install the free OS of {his,her} choice.
{gnu,osf} could sell them to OEMs for $10 a piece.
It would do two things:
It would help pay for OSF work, and
it would give people a well-documented way to get around the License-per-CPU MicroSoft tax.
(I can't count.) It would also provide a way to more accurately gauge how many Gnu boxes were being shipped.
I can think of people who would buy a copy of the license just on principle.
It's exactly not like that. While it might seem to you a small difference, it's the same difference between me offering you a shirt for $5 and me pulling out a gun and taking $5 from your wallet.
Not too far off. According to a friend of mine, it's illegal to sell a computer without an OS license. It's also very difficult to get an OEM deal with Microsoft that doesn't penalize you (either financially or administratively) for selling a box without one of THEIR Operating Systems in it.
The result is that (in the US) it's viciously difficult to
get an Intel box from a large-volume seller that doesn't have Windows pre-loaded on it. More importantly, it's even harder to get a discount for doing that.
(It's quite different here in Vancouver, where I routinely see adds for boxes where Windows is an add-on option.).
The end result is that many Linux users are effectively forced to pay Microsoft for an OS that they have no intent of using. In other words, it's far closer to your over-the-top example than most people would think.
I think that one thing that somebody should ask for is that Microsoft release and freely license the formats and protocols for anything that they bundle with Windows/Office. That way people really could have an opportunity to compete with them on a fair basis...
"Ask for" meaning "sieze by force"? What you're talking about would level the playing field, but that doesn't make it fair. After all, if I play basketball against Michael Jordan, only I'm equipped with rocket shoes, it might level things out. But by no stretch of the imagination is it fair.
"Ask for", as in "apply in court as part of a lawsuit (DOJ, Sun, Be, etc.).
The current situation is more like I'm sent in to play aginst Michael Jordan on a minefield -- where he knows where all the mines are, and he has the ability to add more if I manage to find a path through them.
then I get to deal with the fact that I'm playing against Jordan.
Pretty fair hunh?
What I'm asking for is that he has to flag 3/4 of his mines.
One thing to consider is that some of the stuff that they did would not have been feasable if they didn't have a monopoly already. Even the money that they put into developing IE came from the massive profits that they got from their windows/office monopoly.
It's kinda like the King of England in the 1760's saying
"If you don't like my rules, you can start your own country. --
Of course if you try to do that, I'll jail you for treason"
I think that one thing that somebody should ask for is that Microsoft release and freely license the formats and protocols for anything that they bundle with Windows/Office. That way people really could have an opportunity to compete with them on a fair basis...
If they want to produce something with secret formats, they'd have to develop and market it separately from their Windows/Office monopoly.
My intent is that whatever MS sells as a part of their monopoly, people would have the ability to develop an alternative -- at the same time, it wouldn't restrict them from competing fairly in a new market.
Part of the reason why Netscape couldn't keep up to IE could be attributed to the fact the MS 'cut off their air supply'. Lack of income from their secondary income sources would have made it difficult to fund the level of development that MS was able to fund (on top of their ability to simply force Netscape out of the market via back-room politics and even threats).
If Microsoft had fought fairly we would have (at the very least) seen a LOT more development going into the browser space before it was sewn up. At the very least, this would have meant a better {,quality} product.
On the other hand, it's quite possible that Microsoft would NOT have been able to work their
way, legally, past Netscape. In that case, we would have probably ended up with a better quality browser and some real choice in the market place.
It sounds like the Dragons are kinda like playing russian roulette -- As long as you don't get the one with the bullet in it, life's free and easy, with nothing to worry about.
Making your children into criminals People have an urge to share. We sing songs, we retell stories. When we see a good movie, or hear an incredibly good song, we go to our friends and try to share the experience with them.
Sharing information is a part of human nature, and the purpose of the hundreds of languages that mankind has created over the ages.
The founding fathers of the United States recognized the human need for the sharing of information when they penned the First Ammendment. They said that the right to share information should not be infringed. They did, however, create one, small exception. They allowed congress to give creators of the arts and sciences a short term monopoly over their created works, in the hopes that.
The apparent intent of that constitutional paragraph was that, after a short period of time the works created as a result of that copyright protection would fall into the public domain, where the people could make full and wholesome use of it.
Current copyright law is, however, an abomination of the original intent of the copyright exception. Instead of giving the creating artist control of his or her work for a short period of time, this control is being treated like permanent property. The original 14 year copyright period has now been extended to about 10 times that number -- and hat number is stretching faster than time itself.
Lost knowledgeElectronic information is fragile and ephemeral. A doomsday laser disk created only 15 years ago is now far less readable than it's 16'th century counterpart. The technology used to create it is now obsolete and almost forgotten.
Technical audio tapes of the apollo moon landing were almost unreadable when researchers rescued them from archives only 30 years after Neil armstrong uttered his famous words
"One small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind".
When Mandella was sentanced in 1961, the speech of the future president of South Africa was recorded on (then) hi-tech plastic strips. Less 40 years later it took researchers years to recreate the technology needed to extract sound from those strips.
And when was the last time you tried to play an 8-track tape?
If history is any predictor of the future, the recordings of today are going to be opaque to the next generation. If the Media industry has their way, todays recordings will be taboo to future generations.
As NASA archivists have found out, the only way to keep yesterday's electronic information available is to transfer it to storage formats available today. The proposed terms of the SSSCA would, however, make such transferr illegal -- especially if the person or company who created the original work was dead, defunct, or simply un-locatable.
Our grandchildren would then be left with the unenviable choice of being forever unable to view what we creating today -- or becoming criminals by attempting to read such mundane things as videos of their parents' first steps.
By the year 2100, todays digital recordings will be far less readable than the scratchy vinyl recordings of the 1940s, but people may be unwilling to decoding them -- fearful of the legal implications of having the technology necessary to decode something recorded today.
If the sssca is allowed to pass, it will, in all liklihood, create a digital black hole in the history of the arts and sciences of the world.
well, if you presume that all hosts download at the same speed (which your description seems to do), then you don't really need to do a partial download at all... Just split the download equally between all the available hosts.
Once one of the hosts finishes downloading it's section, then you can sick it on the end of the remaining part with the longest estimated download time (calculate how large a piece to bite off by
the calculation of the relative D/L speeds of the two servers).
Keep doing that until the remaining blocks are too small to be worth repartitioning -- at which time you just start dropping
servers from the queue (slowest drops first).
A couple of points: First of all -- Slashdot was willing to put an update on their page that essentially seemed to say 'oops!'.. unlike many other news organizations which would probably just quietly change (or drop) the story.
Secondly:
I don't program in the microsoft vein, but when I extracted
the.zip file what I ended up with didn't look like a complete
program.
After moving all of the.cpp.h and.txt files to a directory called 'parts',
I was left with the following>
% file *
Gnucleus.aps: MSVC.res
Gnucleus.clw: ASCII English text, with CRLF line terminators
Gnucleus.dsp: ASCII English text, with CRLF line terminators
Gnucleus.dsw: ASCII text, with CRLF line terminators
Gnucleus.exe.manifest: XML document text
Gnucleus.ncb: MSVC program database ver 2.00^M
Gnucleus.opt: Microsoft Office Document
Gnucleus.plg: HTML document text
Gnucleus.rc: C++ program text
parts: directory (where I put the parts)
resource.hm: C++ program text
From the GPL:
The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for
making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source
code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any
associated interface definition files,
plus the scripts used to
control compilation and installation of the executable.
That last part seems to be missing here, if I'm not mistaken. As far as I'm concerned, it's a very important part.
To put it more suscinctly: Has anybody actually managed to COMPILE the sources that they distributed???, and shouldn't there be a source file for Gnucleus.aps
?
Slashdot Mirror
Underfunded school boards can often get people to do volunteer work for them (hey, it's beneficial to their kids (or it's the kids that are doing the volunteering)). This presumes, of course, that you don't have people like this Darga guy, greeting potential volunteers with a firehose and nightstick.
The "you are a prick" part caught me off guard. If Mr. Darga needs some help, he is NEVER going to get it with that kind of attitude (even from his co-workers and underlings).
I think that Mr. Darge needs a vacation, a good course in stress management and another course in dealing with the public.
I can actually understand it in this case, where there wasn't an obvious alternative to email service -- and it actually makes sense in the context of the BC rules of court (which I've read) which allows a judge to OK non-standard methods of service, in a specific case where traditional methods have been proven non-fruitful.
This decision does not appear to approve email service as a general method. It does, however, mean that if you're playing electronic hide-and-seek with someone who is trying to sue you, you may get 'tagged' by email.
Where I worry about it as a general solution is where someone serves me by email with something that looks like spam (or where spammers catch on to email service, and start to use 'service' envelopes to force people to read their stuff (on pain of default judgement if it was a real notice)).
I would then be stuck between the rock of having to read every piece of spam that comes through my mailbox, and the hard place of missing a notice of lawsuit that the RIAA is suing me for $1,000,000 because I had a DECSS link on my web page.
The 2=1 proof depended on creating a non-obvious reference to 0/0=1, and then reducing down to 2=1.
Looking at it for a while, I relized that 0/0=x is the same as solving for 0=x*0 ... In other words, X can be anything (integer, real , complex...).
In first-year honors calculus, I realized that calculus is based on the same kind of construct, except for that you're solving for the limit of a/b=x as a and b approach zero -- in other words, dancing with the devil of 0/0.
The moral of my story:
Any references to prior art (I first came up with that pun in 1980)?On the other hand, if you're suggesting that I have a T1 line, or something similar, then:
No. The ADSL is actually an analog signal that goes on higher frequencies than the voice signal that modems do. Depending on the type of ADSL system you have, you may (or may not) need to add a low-pass filter to keep the ADSL signal (essentially low-frequency radio) from frying your ears -- that's essentially what the splitters are (as far as I can tell).
With the older (amati) ADSL modem I had, the splitter failed and, as an experiment (he didn't have a replacement on hand), he tried simply removing it. I couldn't tell the difference. With the (newer/cheaper) 3COM home-connect ADSL modem (which replaced the Amati, when it (sigh) died), pulling out the splitter resulted in serious screech on my phone handset, and shut down the digital signal.
The rest of the phone signal for an ADSL line is regular analog POTS. If you think owherwise, you're confusing ADSL with ISDN. ISDN is a pure digital system
What they're doing is taxing the competition out of existence... To use the software made by anybody other than Microsoft, you have to pay Microsoft extra money. -- This, of course, presumes that Microsoft will even deign to give you such a license. Although this doesn't technically fully ban such software, it effectively puts them out of the market -- because if you have to buy a microsoft license to use a competitor's product, why not just use the MS product and save the cost of the competition's product?
well, when I use my A-Open 56K modem to connect the via phone to Telus (my isp), I regularly get 40K+ on the connections... (according to my modem, anyways). -- and that's ON TOP of the ADSL signal on the line. (and was in a relatively bad location for ADSL. I rarely got over 2 megabit down, although I almost always got 1/2 megabit up. I was actually near one of those 'holes' where you were too far from the switch center to get ADSL at all).
You mean like the 4 foot by 6foot oil painting that I have a bitch of a time finding a good space for when I move?? Or do you mean the other assorted paintings and drawings that I've collected over time, or one of the thousands of photos that I've taken? (you know you're hardcore when the clerk at the commercial photo shop you get your pictures developed at apologizes for not remembering your name when you walk in).
Most of the techies I know tend to have a higher appreciation of art than most of the non-techies I know. (( In truth, many of us will qualify our description of a piece of code as 'beautiful', or 'a piece of art'. This is not meant as a denigration other art forms, but rather an expression of an active asthetic sense)).
The hard part would be shaving him clean enough to make the suction cups stick.
Of course, all of this puts a completely different spin on the phrase "wave table".
Before his company got attached to the net, they were using an address of '11.*' for their internal computers, which included a number of Sun workstations -- some doing double duty as routers. For those of you who don't know, RFC 1918 officially designates 3 network ranges for this sort of work -- 192.168.*, 10.* and 172.16.0/12. 11.0 obviously doesn't fit in that range.
When they got their network attached to the 'net, they had to do a good deal of work to renumber all of their computers to have 'proper' IP addresses (either in their assigned block, or in an RFC1918 non-routing block).
Within an hour of connecting their box to the 'net, they got a rather brusque call from an intelligence agency official demanding to know why they were stealing his packets. They had to disconnect from the network and root around their network until they found (and removed) the errant subnet stub. It turns out that they had managed to miss one SUN with a second ethernet card that was no longer attached to an active subnet (but still routing to the stub subnet). This was back at a time when any SUN with two ethernet cards routed by default, and every machine ran routed(8) as a matter of course (much easier than having to do manual routing all the time!). It turns out that the route to the stub network had leaked out to the larger internet and poisoned the routing for a huge pool of machines.
When I teach networking, I use it as an example of why you should always use the proper non-routing addresses for internal networks.
(I just did a whois, and 11.0/8 is actually owned by the Defence Intelligence Agency, not the CIA. Not like there's a big difference for us civies.)
I think that, perhaps, a better idea than a (flimsy) airplane would be a rocket. Mount it at a likely site, and then, when a nice tornado comes overhead, remote launch it straight into the storm... A couple of solid rocket engines and a casing with a GPS tranmitter in it to help locate it afterwards.
As one industry website points out,
The myth of the "perfect digital copy" is just that -- a myth. This should be the heart of the attack. The argument that current royalty rates would put Internet radio out of business is irrelevent if you accept the claim that Internet radio is threatening to put the recording industry (a much larger industry) out of business.On the other hand, try this on for size.
-
Find a reasonably good quality net broadcaster.
- Make a copy of a good song off of that net cast.
- Make a copy of that same song off of the radio
-
Play back an original CD of the sound, followed by the netcast, and then the radio copy.
-
notice which is the best, and which is the worst.
Although a 'perfect' copy of a CD is possible, it takes 300Kbits to do so. A 128Kbit MP3 is good, but I can tell the difference between a CD and an MP3 when played on my rommate's (MP3 CD capable) car stereo.Internet radion, on the other hand, rarely reaches those rates. looking at the Real audio's tuner page shows 3 station:
KASR FM Radio (sports) broadcasts at 20Kbits/second (I'd describe it as grotty)
Euromix Radio(" Pop to house, trance, techno and energy remixes from DJ Daizzy, ToolMix, Terry Tate and..") broadcasts at 32K bits/second. This is actually better quality than many netcasters, but you can definitely tell that it's a net cast. even with pure voice content in a language I can't understand. KASR radio (specializing in classical music, and thus a good representative of the "high end" of the quality scale) broadcasts at 64Kbits/second. Decent quality, but -- at 6:30AM, on a Sunday -- they're at their audience limit. I can still hear the bite of audio compression (when I can reach them). --- In fact, they're not up to the quality of AM radio -- much less FM.
Going to their search listing for "Seattle", (where Real Audio is based) shows stations rangingr from 20K bps up to 96K for Groove Radio (split between audio and video). I actually found a listing for a Chicago station that claimed 256K/sec, but I couldn't get to them. (I'm guessing that they're also a video/audio mix).
When I worked at GlobalMedia.com (now defunct), we had people who could squeeze the last bit of quality out of a 64K audio stream... (some webcasters don't quite understand what the issues are for getting a decent quality webcast). Even so, the quality never stood up to broadcast radio -- much less the CD player on my computer going through my (25 year old) receiver.
-----
Once you debunk the 'perfect digital copy' myth, then you can get on to the question of what's a resonable royalty rate, as opposed to what would compensate the RIAA for their supposed loss of business.
Erg:
It just hit me: The OSF and/or Gnu should sell software licenses. Like: real licenses, with the hologram seals, serial numbers and everything... They chould shrink-wrap thim with a copy of the GPL and they should do all the administrative work of keeping track of them.
That's right -- Licenses to use free operating systems. The end-user would then be free to {,buy and} install the free OS of {his,her} choice.
{gnu,osf} could sell them to OEMs for $10 a piece. It would do two things:
- It would help pay for OSF work, and
- it would give people a well-documented way to get around the License-per-CPU MicroSoft tax.
- (I can't count.) It would also provide a way to more accurately gauge how many Gnu boxes were being shipped.
I can think of people who would buy a copy of the license just on principle.Not too far off. According to a friend of mine, it's illegal to sell a computer without an OS license. It's also very difficult to get an OEM deal with Microsoft that doesn't penalize you (either financially or administratively) for selling a box without one of THEIR Operating Systems in it.
The result is that (in the US) it's viciously difficult to get an Intel box from a large-volume seller that doesn't have Windows pre-loaded on it. More importantly, it's even harder to get a discount for doing that.
(It's quite different here in Vancouver, where I routinely see adds for boxes where Windows is an add-on option.).
The end result is that many Linux users are effectively forced to pay Microsoft for an OS that they have no intent of using. In other words, it's far closer to your over-the-top example than most people would think.
"Ask for" meaning "sieze by force"? What you're talking about would level the playing field, but that doesn't make it fair. After all, if I play basketball against Michael Jordan, only I'm equipped with rocket shoes, it might level things out. But by no stretch of the imagination is it fair."Ask for", as in "apply in court as part of a lawsuit (DOJ, Sun, Be, etc.).
The current situation is more like I'm sent in to play aginst Michael Jordan on a minefield -- where he knows where all the mines are, and he has the ability to add more if I manage to find a path through them.
then I get to deal with the fact that I'm playing against Jordan.
Pretty fair hunh?
What I'm asking for is that he has to flag 3/4 of his mines.
It's kinda like the King of England in the 1760's saying
I think that one thing that somebody should ask for is that Microsoft release and freely license the formats and protocols for anything that they bundle with Windows/Office. That way people really could have an opportunity to compete with them on a fair basis...If they want to produce something with secret formats, they'd have to develop and market it separately from their Windows/Office monopoly.
My intent is that whatever MS sells as a part of their monopoly, people would have the ability to develop an alternative -- at the same time, it wouldn't restrict them from competing fairly in a new market.
If Microsoft had fought fairly we would have (at the very least) seen a LOT more development going into the browser space before it was sewn up. At the very least, this would have meant a better {,quality} product.
On the other hand, it's quite possible that Microsoft would NOT have been able to work their way, legally, past Netscape. In that case, we would have probably ended up with a better quality browser and some real choice in the market place.
Not if it includes the source code for the Mac version... (I doubt that apple was willing to embed all that nasty code into their OS...).
It seems I forgot the smiley....
It sounds like the Dragons are kinda like playing russian roulette -- As long as you don't get the one with the bullet in it, life's free and easy, with nothing to worry about.
I guess they haven't quite gotten the capitalist concept that when there's a glut in your market, the last thing you need is more production.
People have an urge to share. We sing songs, we retell stories. When we see a good movie, or hear an incredibly good song, we go to our friends and try to share the experience with them. Sharing information is a part of human nature, and the purpose of the hundreds of languages that mankind has created over the ages.
The founding fathers of the United States recognized the human need for the sharing of information when they penned the First Ammendment. They said that the right to share information should not be infringed. They did, however, create one, small exception. They allowed congress to give creators of the arts and sciences a short term monopoly over their created works, in the hopes that.
The apparent intent of that constitutional paragraph was that, after a short period of time the works created as a result of that copyright protection would fall into the public domain, where the people could make full and wholesome use of it.
Current copyright law is, however, an abomination of the original intent of the copyright exception. Instead of giving the creating artist control of his or her work for a short period of time, this control is being treated like permanent property. The original 14 year copyright period has now been extended to about 10 times that number -- and hat number is stretching faster than time itself.
Lost knowledgeElectronic information is fragile and ephemeral. A doomsday laser disk created only 15 years ago is now far less readable than it's 16'th century counterpart. The technology used to create it is now obsolete and almost forgotten.
Technical audio tapes of the apollo moon landing were almost unreadable when researchers rescued them from archives only 30 years after Neil armstrong uttered his famous words "One small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind".
When Mandella was sentanced in 1961, the speech of the future president of South Africa was recorded on (then) hi-tech plastic strips. Less 40 years later it took researchers years to recreate the technology needed to extract sound from those strips.
And when was the last time you tried to play an 8-track tape?
If history is any predictor of the future, the recordings of today are going to be opaque to the next generation. If the Media industry has their way, todays recordings will be taboo to future generations.
As NASA archivists have found out, the only way to keep yesterday's electronic information available is to transfer it to storage formats available today. The proposed terms of the SSSCA would, however, make such transferr illegal -- especially if the person or company who created the original work was dead, defunct, or simply un-locatable.
Our grandchildren would then be left with the unenviable choice of being forever unable to view what we creating today -- or becoming criminals by attempting to read such mundane things as videos of their parents' first steps.
By the year 2100, todays digital recordings will be far less readable than the scratchy vinyl recordings of the 1940s, but people may be unwilling to decoding them -- fearful of the legal implications of having the technology necessary to decode something recorded today.
If the sssca is allowed to pass, it will, in all liklihood, create a digital black hole in the history of the arts and sciences of the world.
Once one of the hosts finishes downloading it's section, then you can sick it on the end of the remaining part with the longest estimated download time (calculate how large a piece to bite off by the calculation of the relative D/L speeds of the two servers).
Keep doing that until the remaining blocks are too small to be worth repartitioning -- at which time you just start dropping servers from the queue (slowest drops first).
There's enough spam in this world without someone writing a dedicated OS for the task.
First of all -- Slashdot was willing to put an update on their page that essentially seemed to say 'oops!'.. unlike many other news organizations which would probably just quietly change (or drop) the story. Secondly: I don't program in the microsoft vein, but when I extracted the
After moving all of the .cpp .h and .txt files to a directory called 'parts',
I was left with the following>
% file *
Gnucleus.clw: ASCII English text, with CRLF line terminators
Gnucleus.dsp: ASCII English text, with CRLF line terminators
Gnucleus.dsw: ASCII text, with CRLF line terminators
Gnucleus.exe.manifest: XML document text
Gnucleus.ncb: MSVC program database ver 2.00^M
Gnucleus.opt: Microsoft Office Document
Gnucleus.plg: HTML document text
Gnucleus.rc: C++ program text
parts: directory (where I put the parts)
resource.hm: C++ program text
From the GPL:
That last part seems to be missing here, if I'm not mistaken. As far as I'm concerned, it's a very important part.To put it more suscinctly: Has anybody actually managed to COMPILE the sources that they distributed???, and shouldn't there be a source file for Gnucleus.aps ?